


Darcy and the Machines

by haysebecca



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Awesome Darcy Lewis, Clint is surprisingly sympathetic, Clint's love of terrible TV, Completely and totally abandoned, Darcy Feels, Darcy hears things, F/M, Give up hope all ye who enter here, JARVIS kicks ass, Jane the Giant Toddler, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Work In Progress, X-gene Darcy, migraines suck
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-04-01 20:31:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,741
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4033558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/haysebecca/pseuds/haysebecca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time it happened she was four, she was too young to know that it wasn’t normal for the coffee table to start talking to you, and she laughed, because he told her a really funny joke. Her hyper religious parents did not take lightly to the event and had prayed over by the entire church, and then they burned the coffee table. Which if you asked her now she would have said was a little overkill considering that it was a family heirloom.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Preface

The first time it happened she was four, she was too young to know that it wasn’t normal for the coffee table to start talking, and she laughed, because he told her a really funny joke. Her hyper religious parents did not take lightly to the event and had her prayed over by the entire church then burned the coffee table. Which if you asked her now she would have said was a little overkill considering that it was a family heirloom. The second time it happened she was seven, and had no desire to repeat the “cleansing” process that had happened three years prior, so she didn’t tell her parents, or anyone for that matter, that the music box on the book shelf in the corner of the living room spent all day talking about being carried over from Germany in an airman’s pack during World War II. Darcy loved the music box. It always sounded so wistful and definitely told the best stories.

  
After the music box it was her grandfather’s pocket watch, then a bracelet that was from a great-great-great grandmother. She didn’t tell anyone, ever. She didn’t want to tell them about the stories, the sitting in the floor with each and every one of them, learning their stories from back to front. Eventually she got the grandfather clock in their back room to talk to her, his booming voice would fill the room, warm and comforting, and he became her best friend. The grandfather clock was the first one to ever learn her name. All the others just told and retold their stories and experiences. Through the grandfather clock she learned that not only could she hear them, but they could hear her. It was the singularly most exciting moment of her life. Until Thor anyways. Her parents were always in and out of the house. Leaving her there with neighbors looking in on her every now and then. So the realization that she could actually talk to something, and get a response more than, “Not now Darcy, I’ve got to finish this pie for the pot luck,” or, ”Darcy you know I’m too busy for this just go to your room!” was absolutely world changing.

  
Through school, the one constant in her life was that she could go home and the grandfather clock would be there waiting for her. He would tell her about his day, about how one of his gears was loose, and ask if she would just be a dear and tighten that for her. She started keeping her dad’s screwdriver set in the drawers beside him. She would pull of his face and tighten the tiny gear then gently close him back up. He would always sigh with contentment and thank her for being, “the best little clock-smith in all of Green county.” Then she would pull out her homework and he would talk to her about being in a duchess’ villa for the first thirteen years of his live, and then moving to New England and being sold at auction to a crooked senator. She would spend the rest of her day listening to his stories, and she would talk to him too. She would tell him about how Jean Ann pulled her hair that day, and how Robert Mathews was the worst person on the face of the planet, ever. And he would listen. He would actually listen.

  
When Darcy got into high school she had less time to spend with the grandfather clock, but he would always tell her that it was okay, she was growing older now and he understood that she didn’t have enough time. After all if there was anything he understood it was time. Her sophomore year her parents got a divorce, her mother left with the grandfather clock and she stayed with her father. She cried for the first week over the loss of her best friend. The music box tried to console her but her sweet French tones just weren’t the same as his warm, booming voice. Her delicate twinkle didn’t fill the room the same way, or at all, and the music box never needed her to tighten any gears or wind her back up. After the grandfather clock left younger and younger things began talking to her. First a spoon, when she was eating breakfast, then a bow-tie that her choir director was wearing, and then suddenly the flood gates opened and everything began talking to her. She started getting migraines and she couldn’t sleep at night for all of the voices. Her dad was convinced that she was depressed, and made her see one of the counselors at the church. She hated it. And hated him. He would spend the duration of every session talking about the urges that the youth of today were succumbing to, and how her migraines were caused by the accumulation of all of the sins she had committed. Her last session, before he refused to ever see her again, she spent lecturing him about the Enlightenment period, and modern medicine.

  
College was terrible, her roommate’s things would always yell to overpower her few belongings so she spent the majority of her time out of her dorm, in parks, or antique shops. Antique shops quickly became a favorite of hers. The older something was, the more reluctant it was to share its story, antiques were quieter, and much more comforting. Libraries were great too. Books didn’t ever tell much about themselves, they didn’t like to give away what was in their pages. Everything else had spent so long listening to librarians shush people that they adopted the stance too, and spent all day acting like normal furniture. It was in a library that Darcy first applied for Dr. Jane Foster’s internship, it was in the same library that she learned she had been selected.

  
Working with Jane taught her many things. Among them, how to feed belligerent scientists, collating data, patience, and that electronics would literally tell her how to fix them, how to make them better. She spent all of her spare time with Jane working on her machines, trying to make them more metal, less duct tape. When Thor landed, had one of the radars not literally be screaming at her that, “oh my god were all going to die, in coming, in coming,” she probably wouldn’t have noticed. After the whole ordeal, when SHEILD was confiscating all of their equipment, data, and her iPod, the machines were cursing them just as much as Jane was. When they finally got them back they each spent the next week asking Darcy why she let them get defiled. They also told her where each and every one of the bugs were, which was even better.

  
The duration of her internship was slightly less eventful. Jane drug her cross country looking for the “perfect place” to launch her bridge thingy. And Eric left to help SHEILD with some super-secret project that ended up being just as world ending as Darcy had expected it would be. And wasn’t that fantastic that they had them locked up in bum fuck nowhere. Jane was pissed, needless to say. And so were the machines, apparently they had liked his boisterous personality. The next year or so was pretty uneventful. Then England happened. And Dark elves happened. And Jane and the aether happened. After England happened Thor demanded that while he was away in Asgard Jane and Darcy stay with his “Shield Mates” because he could not bear the thought of coming back one day to see them and finding that they had met an untimely demise.

  
The move into Stark Tower was one of the most difficult things Darcy had ever had to deal with. Stark spent the majority of the time insisting that they just forget their old machines and let him build them new ones. Jane gave him a look that would make any man wither, and informed him that if they were coming so were there “duct tape monstrosities.” For the first time Darcy was thankful for Jane’s strange attachment to just about anything she came into contact with. Darcy couldn’t think of a believable way to defend the machines without giving away that they were kind of her best friends.

One thing Darcy had learned over the years, was that objects tended to adopt the personality of whoever their first owner was, which would explain why Darcy and the Jane’s machines were BFFLs, Darcy and Jane were BFFLs, and the machines were basically Jane. So the fact that Stark Tower was extremely loud came to no shock to Darcy. She anticipated it, and because of that she had already made the decision to keep as little in her room as possible, which wasn’t hard considering she really didn’t have much. She was not prepared, however to explain to Clint when he walked into her room unannounced one day, why the only thing she had in her room was a bed and a set of drawers. No shelves, no knick-knacks, and no keep sakes.


	2. Chapter 1

           

Moving in to Stark-cum-Avengers tower was definitely an experience. Moving Jane anywhere was like dealing with a tired toddler. Everything had to be just so, and you couldn’t possibly even hint at changing the organization of _anything_ without her getting even more frustrated. The machines weren’t exactly helpful either. They all had specific ways they demanded to be packed, padded, and moved. One of the EMP monitors went as far as to make passive comments about how terrible it would be if she happened to acquire internal damage if Darcy happened to pack her with sub-par bubble wrap and put her in any box less than industrial strength, “preferably with that handsome spectrometer if you don’t mind.” Yep, Darcy had entered the special hell. The one for people who obviously found joy in kicking puppies in a past life. The worst part was she knew they would do it too. Every single one of them would ‘accidently’ break in some minor, but incredibly complicated way, if they weren’t packed just so. And if that happened Jane would have a meltdown of epic proportions, and Stark would have a field day shoving the mechanical failures in their faces.

So Darcy spent an entire _week_ packing, unpacking, and rearranging moody machinery and astrophysicists. Well machinery and one astrophysicist, but with the mood swings that Jane had whenever moving was happening, she was easily equal to at least four astrophysicists. Small stature and delicate nature be damned. Tasing Thor had nothing on angry, irritable Jane.

Once everything was packed up and shipped out, praise the lord, all Darcy wanted was a bubble bath, a glass of wine, and some form of mass produced media. That however was completely impossible. The last week had been spent packing machines, and as Darcy was getting ready for bed so she could sleep at least four hours before their flight out, she realized that she hadn’t seen Jane pack any of her stuff. At all. In the last week and a half that they had been preparing to ship out, all she had seen Jane pack were computers, notes, files, and equipment. No clothes, no personal belongings, not even clean underwear.

“Jane?” Darcy called out tiredly.

“Hold on, I’ve got to take this last box out."

“Jane,” Darcy insisted putting a halt to Jane’s moving by grabbing the box in her hands, “have you packed anything yet?”

“Darcy you just spent the last week helping me pack up the lab, you know I’ve packed everything.”

“Yes Jane, we packed up the lab, and I packed up my clothes. But have you packed any of your things. You know, like clothes, or a toothbrush maybe even?” Jane’s face went completely blank and her eyes clouded over for a moment. Darcy sighed and took the box the rest of the way out of her hands. “You haven’t have you. Oh my god Jane, how did you survive without me?”

“I was late. A lot.” She said her voice small and watery. “You love me right?”

“Yes Jane. I will help you pack. And then. You will let me sleep the entire flight.”

Darcy carried the box in her hands out to the truck that was taking the equipment to be shipped. Then went down to Jane’s room, picking up odds and ends of Jane’s as she went. When she got to the room she found Jane standing in the middle of it with a completely defeated look on her face. Surveying the situation made Darcy want to bash her head in. Special. Hell. There were more notes and overflowing file boxes lining the walls. The dirty clothes hamper in one corner of the room had overflowed onto the floor, and the bed was covered in questionably smelling towels. There were at least six moldy coffee cups on the night stand and beside that was a trashcan overflowing with pop tart wrappers and crumpled up notes.

“Well, kudos on getting the pop-tart wrappers in the trash. I’m going to go grab some of the body bag sized trash bags, and a bottle of vodka. While I’m doing that, you can figure out if we need to call a decontamination unit about those coffee mugs.”

Four hours later Jane’s room was some semblance of packed. No one would ever call it organized. Or even slightly neat, in fact the whole thing really looked like when Darcy’s four year old cousin had to clean her room for the first time. But either way, it was done, and Darcy had never felt more relieved. Her head also hadn’t hurt this bad in quite a while. After a week of arguing with Jane’s machines and then the past four hours of listening to coffee mugs scream about how they weren’t made for mold, and could someone please kill them now, she really wanted some Tylenol, or morphine, either one would work. She heaved a big sigh and jumped in the shower. She could deal with a headache on the plane, she could not however deal with feeling like she spent three days sleeping in a dumpster.

The flight to New York was uneventful, thank god. The last thing Darcy needed today was an eventful flight. Eventfulness in her life seem to only come in world ending proportions. So she was totally fine with uneventful, thankful for it even. Getting to the Tower took forever. One thing Darcy was not looking forward to about living in New York was the traffic. The inside of the cab they had gotten smelled like cherry tobacco, and someone had left an especially rowdy hat at some point. The entire hour and a half they spent in the cab the hat hit on her. She had never felt so violated by a piece of clothing. At one point after it made a completely asinine comment about her rack, she kicked it under the seat so hard it stated cussing her out and Jane gave her a look that said she was completely and totally insane.

“You okay Darcy?” Jane asked cautiously.

“I’m fine,” Darcy grumbled, “I’m just tired, and my legs are kind of cramping,” she said as she kicked the hat again. And then mumbled something about hats and fire.

The cab pulled over at the curb in front of the Tower and Darcy had never been so happy to see a building before. A giant building. Like holy shit, Tony Stark certainly knew how to overcompensate. Jane and Darcy exited the cab and entered the tower through the sliding doors. The outside of the building had nothing on the inside. And this was just the public part she reminded herself. The interior was very professional, and even the fake plants only talked about stock and the economy. The front desk was being manned by an impressively unimpressed looking older lady who definitely didn’t put up with anything from _anyone_. She was definitely Darcy’s new role model. As the two of them approached the desk a large man came up to them.

“Dr. Foster, Miss Lewis, my name is Harold Hogan, you can call me Happy. Mr. Stark has asked me to escort you up to the common floor, and from there he will show you to your rooms.”

Darcy and Jane followed Happy into the elevator. As soon as the doors closed the elevator began to rise a rate Darcy knew was not normal. Then again this was a tower made by Tony Stark, presumably nothing would be normal, or average. Stark did not do anything in halves. The Elevator came to a stop smoothly and the doors whisked open. Happy led the girls into the common room as Stark wandered out of a hallway with his phone pressed to his ear.

“Sir, I believe Dr. Foster and Miss Lewis are here,” a posh British voice said. Darcy repressed the urge to look around the room for the object that had such a soothing and slightly omnipresent voice. The last thing she wanted to do was give her psychosis away to Tony Stark of all people.

Darcy’s heart leapt into her throat as she realized that she wasn’t the _only_ person that heard it. Jane’s head whipped around to find the source of the voice, and Happy’s eyes lit slightly in amusement as he watched her. Tony smiled to himself at Jane’s reaction.

“Lewis! Foster! It’s about time you get here. I was just asking JARVIS if you had bailed on us.”

“Jarvis? Is he like your butler or something?”

“As a matter of fact Lewis, he’s only the most advanced AI ever made, by yours truly in fact. He’ll help you guys get settled. Hate to chat and run, but Pepper will have my head, and my suit, if I don’t get my ass down to the board meeting soon.” Tony got into to elevator and Happy followed him closely to make sure he actually got to the meeting.

“So, can everyone hear you Jarvis?” Darcy asked slowly, and hopefully unsuspiciously.

“Yes Miss Lewis. Sir has given me many speakers to ensure that anyone may communicate with me at their leisure. Now if you would follow the lights, I will direct you to your accommodations.”

Darcy had expected to have to get used to the new people and things in the tower, but she didn’t expect the tower to actually speak. Buildings didn’t speak. Just about anything else could, but buildings could not. At least this wasn’t her insanity though. At least everyone else could hear Jarvis too. The only problem she could see with this though was what if she forgot to respond to him verbally? Or what if she got so used to talking to him that she accidently spoke to something else in front of someone else? There was only so many times you could claim you were talking to yourself before other people began to catch on to the fact that there was something not quite right with you. Out of all of the problems Darcy had expected to run into at Stark Tower, this was one she was not prepared for.

The edges of the floor began to emit a gentle blue light as Jarvis led them towards a separate elevator. On the ride up three floors, Jane basically interrogated the AI about everything from his processing power to his capabilities. Which apparently were numerous and vast. He was a learning program, so anything he couldn’t do he could learn, unless of course it was outside of his parameters. Or involved harming any of the towers inhabitance. That apparently was one of the first things Tony had programed him not to do.

“So basically you’re Tony’s version of Skynet? Or at least the start of it?” Darcy asked.

“Agent Barton certainly seems to think so,” Jarvis almost sounded amused at the comparison.

The elevator stopped just a gently as the first time, and the doors opened just as soundlessly. They followed the lights down a hallway before they came up to a living area and a kitchen, completely furnished and full of all sorts of gadgets, and what had to be the most high tech coffee maker that Darcy had ever seen. She was in love. The first room that Jarvis directed them towards was the master suite. Which, small mercies, were on the other side of the floor from Darcy’s room and the three guest rooms. One thing Darcy never wanted to experience again was sharing a wall with Jane when Thor was earth side. Jane when to get settled in her room and Darcy to hers. The first thing Darcy did when she got into her new room was sink to the floor and wonder how the hell she was supposed to do this.


	3. Chapter 2

Adjusting to the Avengers tower was not nearly as much fanfare as Darcy had thought it would be. She didn’t even meet any of the other Avengers until about week three when Bruce came back from where ever he had been. He came in, introduced himself to her and Jane, and then was promptly absorbed into whatever it was had been working on before he left. Clint was the next Avenger that they met. Well, re-met in his case. He walked into the lounge one day and stopped short at Darcy’s cry of, “I knew it!”

“Um, hi?” he questioned slowly reaching for the magazine he had come down for.

“You were in New Mexico! You stopped to help me fix a flat and I knew you had to be one of the MIBs!” she accused pointing a freshly painted finger at him.

“Oh yeah, I forgot Tony had said Foster was coming. Thought you would have ditched her by now.” He scratched his stomach and flopped down on the couch beside her, nudging aside her bowl of popcorn.

“You need help with the other hand?” he asked reaching for the bottle of nail polish.

Natasha was the next, not that she was ever actually formally introduced. But what other kick-ass red head would be drifting in and out of the commons area at odd hours of the day and night. And it turned out she had quite the sweet tooth. Darcy tended to stress bake, and Natasha enjoyed that fact more than she would ever admit to anyone. Darcy could tell when she was drifting around due to a sleepless night, and if it was a night that she too couldn’t find sleep, a batch of cookies, brownies, or cupcakes would be whipped up. And would promptly disappear. Darcy was in awe of Natasha’s ability to sashay in and out of a room undetected, and so it seemed was most of the furniture in the tower.

The last Avenger met was Steve. Darcy met him on his return from his cross country tour. He walked into the lab to talk to Bruce and stopped short at the sight he was greeted with. Darcy was sitting on top of one of the huge machines that he definitely didn’t know the name for, and Jane was trying to reach her with a yard stick. 

“Get off Darcy! You’re throwing off the calibration!” she yelled as she swatted at Darcy with her impromptu weapon.

“No! I’m holding a sit in! You haven’t eaten or slept in over seventy two hours. I refuse to move until you promise to sleep.”

“I’m about to hit a break through, I can feel it! If I stop now I’ll lose it!” Jane wined poking Darcy’s shoe with the stick.

“I will sit here all day Jane. Bertha doesn’t mind, do you Bertha?” Darcy asked, rhetorically as far as Jane and Steve were concerned, patting the metal housing under her.

“I do, actually if you wouldn’t mind getting off.” Bertha huffed. “I am a very expensive, very advanced piece of machinery and you are in fact throwing off my calibration.”

“Um, I don’t mean to interrupt, but have either of you seen Bruce. I thought this was his lab?” Steve asked, cutting short the rant Jane was preparing.

Jane whipped around, startled, not having heard Steve walk in during her battle with Darcy. She blushed and dropped the yard stick like a guilty toddler. Darcy smiled triumphantly knowing that Jane’s halt meant she was one step closer to getting her to bed. An embarrassed Jane was much easier to work with than a sleep deprived manic Jane. 

“Hi, I’m Darcy, this is Jane. She was just headed to bed. Dr. Banner is in the lab next door,” She smiled wolfishly.

“Nice to meet you. Um, thank you,” he said almost cautiously, as if he were afraid that Jane might pick up the yard stick again and come after him. As if he couldn’t defend himself. He backed out of the room and disappeared into Bruce’s lab.

“Now then Jane,” Darcy prompted, “off to bed with you.”

After that it was pretty much smooth sailing with all of them, she and Clint bonded over bad reality T.V. and poorly made under budget sci-fi movies. Steve would help her cook sometimes, and Natasha took her under wing for Coulson mandated hand to hand. As much as Darcy hated it, she did see the need for all Avenger associates to have at least basic survival skills. Tony would pester her about her mechanical knowledge, and Bruce would share tea recipes with her. So far it was going pretty well. And with minimal slip ups on her part. There had only been a hand full of times anyone had caught her ‘talking to herself’ and none of them had seemed to catch on. 

The only down side of the tower was how talkative everything was, and with Jane’s broadened access to Stark Tech lab hours had increased. The two put together with the enthusiasm of Tony, Clint and Thor was beginning to add up. She had began to feel a bit off, but ignored it in light of T.V time with Clint. Something she knew was probably a bad idea but she hadn’t seen the archer in almost two weeks and he had just gotten back from a mission. Having finally gotten Jane to take a nap on the lab couch she headed to the common area to join Clint. The newest season of Dance Moms was starting the following week, and they had planned some serious binge watching in preparation. 

She flopped down on the couch half landing on her target, and half on Clint, not that he minded. He was surprisingly cuddly, something that touch starved Darcy enjoyed quite a bit. He adjusted her so that she was tucked under his arm and she could put her feet up on the coffee table. “How’s my favorite super genius wrangler?”

“Exhausted.” She moaned leaning into his side. “How’d your mission go?”

“Fine, ultra-classified, so don’t even try, but fine,” he laughed at her pout and handed her the pillow she was reaching for. “JARVIS, Dance Moms please.”

“As you wish Agent Barton.”

Darcy was fine until about half way through the first episode, one of the moms was getting Abby Lee’s face when Darcy’s ears started ringing, and she started seeing pin pricks of white. The vase on the coffee table had been sharing its personal views of their television choices, and one of the throw pillows had started defending them. The debate had started out fairly quiet but had grown louder than the T.V. Darcy hissed in pain and Clint stared at her. 

“You okay Darce?” he asked readjusting the throw pillow behind her head.

“Yeah, I’m good. I’m going to grab a glass of water, want anything?” she asked standing up slowly as to ovoid the dizziness she knew was bound to come. 

“I’m good, want me to pause it?” she shook her head as she walked to the kitchen, stopping for a moment as the vertigo spurred at the movement. 

Clint shrugged and continued watching the impending fight between the mom and Abby Lee. “Hey Darcy,” He called pausing the T.V. “Would you bri-“ the sound of shattering glass and a body hitting the floor cut him off. He jumped up and ran into the kitchen to find Darcy passed out on the ground and bleeding. 

“JARVIS, call medical!” he yelled.


End file.
